O’Reilly vs. Perlstein…

Newsweek’s Rick Perlstein responds to Bill O’Reilly over an article Perlstein wrote…

Were I a conservative, and a fan of Sarah Palin, and a viewer of Bill O’Reilly—but not a particularly conscientious reader of Newsweek—I would have been mad at me, too.
What had I written, and what had Newsweek attempted to get away with? Here’s how one friendly blogger summarized “Beyond the Palin”: “Perlstein’s entire article is … a chronicle of the division within Republican ranks between the party’s elites … and its far more strident base.” Any contempt present in the piece, he pointed out, came not in my own voice but those of the elite Republicans I quoted, who “treat part of the base with a certain amount of disdain, courting them with a wink and a nod when necessary, dissociating from them … when they fail to deliver the electoral goods…. Indeed, Perlstein’s article is not so much a liberal elitist sneer at the lumpen proletariat in fly-over country as much as it is a careful examination of conservative elites toward those they regard as such.”

In truth the article was a little more than that. I also quoted author and former Bush speechwriter David Frum asking worriedly, “What’s happening to Fox News?”, and suggested that, in an era of occasional violence from the right-wing fringe, all responsible conservatives should all be asking that question. My friend David Neiwert, a Seattle-based journalist and author of the recent book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, explained to me the problem thus: “I’m hearing now, from supposedly mainstream conservative pundits”—he singled out Fox’s Glenn Beck, who has been entertaining the notion that Obama might not be a natural-born American citizen—”the kind of extreme rhetorical appeals that I used to hear from militia movement leaders in the early 1990s, talk about how the evil liberal president literally intends to destroy our country.”